Whew!

It's crunch time--well, as "crunchy" as it can get for someone who isn't working, I guess. Sunday night I returned from my train trip to visit friends in Minnesota, British Columbia, and Alberta. (Thanks, Laura, Richard and Carol, Jessica and friends, and Heather and Mike, for a great time!) Next Monday I leave for orientation in Pennsylvania. In the meantime, I'm running last-minute errands, filling out paperwork, and doing a lot of shopping: for shoes (size elevens being scarce in Bolivia), clothes (few Bolivian stores being likely to carry my size), and random accessories (camera case, CD case, and who the heck sells replacements for those little foam covers on headphone earpieces?).

All this shopping is making me think about how much of it I should really be doing. I find myself in the interesting position of preparing for a life of service among people who live simply by engaging in frenetic consumer activity. You know what I think is at stake? Trust. Maybe if I can enter an unfamiliar situation surrounded by everything I can anticipate needing, I won't feel so insecure. But maybe insecurity is inevitable and what I can control is how I confront it--by trusting in things or trusting in God to supply my needs. It would be imprudent to go completely unprovisioned, but the truth is, I can never be prepared for everything I'll encounter in my new surroundings.

I guess these shopping trips have been a reminder of how accustomed I am to placing my trust in things. I hope living with fewer things for a while will help me see the poverty of that position.

Here are a few pictures I took on my train trip. We live in a beautiful continent, don’t we?